Instagram has over 1000 million users and more that 85% of them follow at least one influencer on instagram. Instagramers play an important role when talking about digital and social marketing. That's why an instagramer with 100.000 followers can receive between 500€ and 700€ per post. But, are they really effective? Do influencers on instagram really impact their follower's purchase behavior?

In an attempt to answer this question a market research following the survey technique was developed. Findings allowed writing some recommendations for brands or companies that may want to include influencers in their communication strategy.

Our goals were to find out how the target defines an influencer, define in wich fields influencers are more effective and find out in what scenarios or themes people really trust influencers.

Due to a big difference on the number of women and men participating it was decided to continue the investigation focusing on women's perception on influencers. Our final sample was constituted by 55 women aged 16-30 that did use instagram. 53% of them has low income (less than 200€/month) and 78% of them were students. 

It was also took into account that a 30,9% of them were heavy users on Instagram, spending on the app more than 3 hour a day and almost half os the sample (49,1%) spent between 1 and 3 hour on Instagram.

The top 3 reasons for women to follow influencers were entertainment, inspiration and personal life.

When talking about the attributes providing credibility to influencers, the most valuable were closeness and quality and aesthetics of their content; while the least valuable was the relationship with other influencers.

It is surprising to find out how influencers may have a big influence on social media and user's life agenda setting, meaning that the present big influence on their followers interests.

They also present influence on consumer behavior.

When they did consume on behalf of an influencer they did it motivated by stories recommendations mostly. How

Women do believe that influencers have a considerable impact on society. Around 25% of the sample rated this influence over 8 on a scale from 1 to 10.

the effectiveness of influencer marketing will depend on each campaign's objectives. However it was observed that more authentic and less pretentious influencers are the ones who have better quality impact on their audiences.